More than the values I discovered beneath the veneer, more than the certainty that my character was being treated to the same kind of vivisection that I witnessed happening to others’, it was that sense of objectification that really began to sour me on my friends and their world. For I had started to realize that I was being treated the same way. Not only were my friends tremendously entertaining people, they gave you the unmistakable impression that they expected to be tremendously entertained—that like Henry, who had “a great dislike” “to anything like a permanence of abode, or limitation of society,” they wouldn’t tolerate a moment’s boredom. And so—it seemed so odd, after all the time we’d spent together—it began to dawn on me that I had never really been able to relax around them, would feel as if I’d been holding my breath the whole time whenever I was in their company. I realized that I always felt as though I had to be on—had to be forever ready with a witty remark or a funny story.
My dating life, with all its perils and pratfalls, became a series of comic vignettes retold for their amusement—which was fine, to a certain extent, because it took away the sting of romantic disappointment, but it also never allowed for any real commiseration or shared feeling. It’s true that I colluded, unconsciously, in my own objectification, wanted to play the raconteur when I saw that it would let me keep a place at the table, but it’s not as if there’d really been a choice. These were not people you wanted to be vulnerable around (they’d probably start calling you “high-maintenance” behind your back), or even just flat in an ordinary way. In fact, since weeks would sometimes go by when I wouldn’t hear from them at all, I started to feel as if I was being treated like a toy: picked up and played with when they wanted whatever it was they thought I had to offer, then dropped again whenever they got bored.
It was just the same in Mansfield Park—as Mary implied when Henry first told her about his designs on the heroine’s heart. Maria Bertram had finally married her wealthy oaf, and her sister Julia, Henry’s first conquest at Mansfield, had gone with them on the honeymoon (as was not unusual in Austen’s day). “You ought to be satisfied with her two cousins,” Mary told her brother about Fanny, but “the truth is, . . . you must have a somebody. . . . If you do set about a flirtation with her, you never will persuade me . . . that it proceeds from anything but your own idleness and folly.” Fanny, for Henry, was nothing more than a hobby at this point, something to do when he wasn’t riding or shooting. Or as he put it himself, “How do you think I mean to amuse myself, on the days that I do not hunt?”
The Bertrams, the Crawfords—why did Austen say such terrible things about the aristocracy, if that was the class she came from and loved so much? Because she didn’t, on either count. Contrary to popular belief, she was neither an aristocrat herself nor, as her books made perfectly clear—Mansfield Park above all—did she even much like the aristocracy. Her heroines, while sometimes rich, were never the richest characters in their books, and they usually didn’t marry the richest ones, either, who were generally rather vile—and the richer they were, the viler they tended to be.
As for Austen herself, her father was a clergyman, and most of her other connections—uncles, brothers, family friends—were clergymen, lawyers, or military officers: gentlemen, yes, but certainly not aristocrats. The Austens were comfortable, but they were far from rich and very far from being, like the families she wrote about, either landed or titled. The Bertrams would have condescended to mix with them, if at all, only in the most distant way—at best, an occasional invitation to a ball, in company with the rest of the district’s respectable families.
While Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters were exempt from household responsibilities, and of course Lady Bertram and her daughters were far above anything but the kind of elegant needlework that gentlewomen used to pass the time, Jane and her sister, Cassandra, as girls, had a full roster of household chores: making clothes for themselves and their father and brothers; helping their mother in the kitchen, dairy, garden, and poultry yard (baking bread, brewing beer, boiling jams and jellies); and even picking up a rake when it was time to make the hay.
After the Reverend Austen died, when Jane was twenty-nine, she and her sister inherited, not the thousand pounds the Bennet girls could each look forward to, and certainly not the twenty thousand that Mary Crawford already possessed, but absolutely nothing at all. Everything they had, they were dependent for on others, meaning their mother, who had little enough of her own, or their other family connections—the most important reason they and Mrs. Austen, together with yet a fourth woman, shared a modest house, provided by a relative, to the end of Austen’s life.
Short of marriage or inheritance—and finding a husband itself depended on having property to offer—women simply had very few ways of supporting themselves in Austen’s day. “Single Women,” as she reminded a niece, “have a dreadful propensity for being poor.” The most common alternative for a young woman of Austen’s class was to become a governess in someone else’s family, a condition that Emma’s Jane Fairfax, staring down its barrel, equated with slavery. The money that Austen was finally able to make from her novels, the first of which was not published until she was thirty-five—£140 from Sense and Sensibility, £110 from Pride and Prejudice—was cherished to the last penny. “Tho’ I like praise as well as anybody,” she once said, “I like what Edward calls Pewter too.” She didn’t just write for the fun of it.
But though Austen neither came from the aristocracy nor entered it, luck gave her a front-row seat for observing its ways. That same Edward, her third brother, had the immense good fortune to be adopted by distant relations, a wealthy, childless couple whose property he inherited and whose name, Knight, he took. Edward’s story may well have given his sister the idea for Mansfield Park, especially since his oldest daughter, the novelist’s favorite niece—eighteen, like Fanny Price, when Austen started to write the novel—was also named Fanny. But if Edward contributed the idea of adoption, and Fanny Knight donated her name, the heroine’s experiences—exclusion, alienation, subordination—belonged to none other than Austen herself.
While she visited her brother’s estate of Godmersham Park any number of times, and struck up that friendship with Fanny Knight, she was never regarded there as anything more than a poor relation. Like Fanny Price at Mansfield Park, or me in that circle of rich New Yorkers, she remained an outsider, and an inferior. The fault was not Edward’s, by all accounts an impeccably generous man (it was he who lent the house, on land attached to yet another one of his estates, in which the Austen women settled after the death of Jane’s father). The fault was not even his wife’s, though when it came to summoning a spinster sister-in-law to help with her many lyings-in (she had eleven children altogether), she much preferred Cassandra. According to a different niece, “a little talent went a long way with the Goodenstone Bridgeses,” Edward’s wife’s family, “& much must have gone a long way too far.”
No, the fault was simply the system’s. Austen was treated like an inferior despite being such a close relation, and despite her immense gifts of character and mind, because according to the way that people thought at the time, that was exactly what she was. Fanny Knight herself, over fifty years after Austen’s death and nearly as many since she had become a titled lady in her own right, put the matter with brutal frankness. Her aunt, she remembered, “was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent.” The Austens as a whole, she continued, “were not rich & the people around with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre & they of course tho’ superior in mental powers & cultivation were on the same level as far as refinement goes.” Cassandra and Jane, she went on, “were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the World & its ways (I mean as to fashion etc.) & if it had not been for Papa’s marriage, . . . they would have been, tho’ not less clever and agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good Society & its ways.”